IJ study archive

Scene 058: joelle last walk

Scene
58
Pages
219–223
When
7 Nov YDAU (2009) — heading p. 219; 'this last day before the great O.N.A.N.ite Interdependence revel' (p. 221); a Saturday (cf. p. 225, scene 060)
Where
Molly Notkin's third-floor co-op, East Cambridge/Back Bay fringe (the Orals party), threaded with the day's walk: Charles St. from the Red Line, Boston Commonin: Back Bay / East-Cambridge co-ops · Downtown Boston (also)
POV
3rd person, tightly inside Joelle — party present-tense interleaved with the walk and last night's bottom

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 16)

Summary

Joelle van Dyne, "at the end of her rope and preparing to hang from it," sits veiled in Méliès's fiberglass lap at Molly Notkin's Orals party, planning to lock herself in a bedroom and freebase until her heart stops — the narration correcting the "pernicious myth" of pre-suicide generosity: the last hours are "an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement." Interleaved is the day's wet walk from the Red Line down Charles St.: the cigar bought for its glass tube, the Pepsi poured down a clogged drain for its bottle, a folded twenty pressed into the cut palm of a wheelchaired beggar in a NOTRE RAI PAYS cap — her freebase kit assembled piece by piece in upscale Boston rain. At the party her mind runs the cage meditations: she and Notkin as "sororal twins," the world as always Two ("one upside-down in a convex lens"); "What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage... The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim's own Cage III: Free Show." The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much; since the moon caller's "never turns its face away," she has finally not turned her face from the fact that she hates it and cannot stop — and last night's bottom (smoking Chore Boy resin, carpet lint, her own shredded panties, "weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors") closes the scene.

What to notice

The opening is a bait-and-switch of register: what reads as detached essayism on how parties end — down to "the expanding white V of utter silence in the party's wake" — is Joelle imagining the room after her own exit; the whole meditation is a displaced self-elegy, delivered before we are told what is in her purse. The staging is a quiet joke with teeth: the future star of the lethal film sits in the fiberglass lap of Méliès, cinema's first illusionist, legs swinging "like a child's," at a party held under what used to be her own window — she attends her past as its ghost. Her errands run consumption backwards: a cigar bought and discarded for its glass tube, a Pepsi poured foaming down a clogged drain for its bottle — the pleasure thrown away, the delivery-vessel kept — and the flat sentence "There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the Store 24." only surrenders its meaning at the scene's final paragraph, when we learn what the pads at home were already used for. Notice the grammar of the plan: the anaphoric "No more" litany, quitting conjugated entirely as relief. And the rain does the dead director's work — the wet veil blurs Boylston Street the way Jim's neonatal lens blurred film, "everything recognizable and yet without outline": she walks toward her death seeing the world through his eyes.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 219: 7 NOVEMBER heading; the phenomenology of parties ending — the unspoken pivot, "the expanding white V of utter silence in the party's wake."
  • p. 219-220: Joelle perched between Cukor and Murnau in Méliès's lap, feet dangling, "sitting by herself under what used to be her window" (p. 220) — the party is in her own former apartment; "a lot of fun to be with, normally, if you can get over the disconcerting veil"; Notkin's celebration of her Film & Film-Cartridge Theory Orals — the program where they met before Joelle's "retreat into broadcast sound."
  • p. 220: The myth correction: pre-suicide hours are "enormous conceit and self-involvement."
  • p. 220-221: Notkin's tormented Pabst scholar and his finite-erection economics; "sisters, sororal twins"; the Two-not-One metaphysics — "The damaged and the intact... The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens."
  • p. 221: "Thinking about what she has in her purse"; her life running "in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm... from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY"; the walk — naked gazes at the veil, "not knowing she could see everything at all times"; the cigar bought, discarded, tube kept.
  • p. 221-222: Charles St.'s gradient into wet-litter destitution; I.W.D. dumpsters and refrigerator-box limbs; "the territory of the Endless Stem" near Charles's end — she dispenses asked-for change, "asked about the deal with the veil with a lack of delicacy she rather prefers"; the wheelchaired man with the NOTRE RAI PAYS cap and the half-healed businesslike palm — "Joelle gives him a folded U.S. twenty and likes that he says nothing."
  • p. 222: Boston Common, "a lush hole Boston's built itself around"; three young black men "perched like tough crows along a bench's back approve her body and call her bitch with harmless affection and ask where's the wedding at."
  • p. 222: Store 24 (no Big Red Soda Water), Pepsi poured foaming into the clogged storm-drain; "There was no need to buy Chore Boy pads at the Store 24."
  • p. 222: The plan and the cage: "so high that she's going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart"; no more 2300-resolutions, no more trash-rooting; "What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon's meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim's own Cage III: Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow."
  • p. 222: "Something about that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not." — the 22 Oct admission of powerlessness, "in a way done as they'd made Jim do near the end."
  • p. 222-223: Last night's bottom in full: Chore Boy resin, carpet bits, the acetate panties, "weeping and veilless and yarn-haired, like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little room's walls."

Themes in this scene

  • Depression and Anhedonia: a suicide planned in the middle of a party, with the narration coolly de-romanticizing the act's psychology.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the most exact freebase procedural in the book — the kit assembled item by item — and the addict's arithmetic ("she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn't stop or imagine stopping").
  • Annularity: exit-as-bars, EXIT over the entrance, "the ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage" — the ring figure at its darkest.
  • Entertainment and the Self: "The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much"; Free Show; pleasure that consumes its consumer — Joelle living the Entertainment's logic before we know she's its star.
  • Film and Optics: the director-chairs, her life as hand-held 16mm, Jim's neonatal lens blur replicated by rain on the veil — her perception is already cinema.
  • Disability and Deformity: the veil in public — naked gazes, the preferred indelicacy of street questions — U.H.I.D. practice ahead of scene 060's doctrine.
  • Memory and Forgetting: "in the director's lap can call up everything from all times" (p. 221) — her life runs before her "in a kind of stuttered old hand-held 16mm... from Uncle Bud and twirling to Orin and Jim and YYY"; total recall staged as a film screening, the suicide's last faculty and last entertainment.
  • Time and Perception: the narration holds three times open at once — party present, the day's walk, last night's bottom — a simultaneity the 16mm figure makes explicit: in the final hours all times are equally, unbearably present, the planned death experienced as the point they converge on.
  • Communication and Solipsism: "You can be at certain parties and not really be there." (p. 219) — a woman planning her death in a crowded room, veiled, her whole opening meditation a self-elegy no guest can hear; on the street she prefers indelicate questions and "likes that he says nothing" — contact managed entirely at one remove.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • "The territory of the Endless Stem" presumes scene 056's lexicon entry: stemming as craft, with professional colloquia (p. 202) — the same street-economy seen from the giver's side.
  • Her "wanted to stop and also couldn't stop" triangulates not just with Erdedy (scene 004) but with Kate Gompert's "But I love it so much. Sometimes it's like the center of my life." (scene 024) — the book's three weeping can't-stop confessions (Carlisle groups all three).
  • "Preparing to hang from it" / the purse inventory mirror Erdedy's terminal-binge logistics (scene 004) — the book's two great solo-binge overtures, one marijuana, one freebase.
  • The "performer and the audience" Two-ness restates the spectation thesis (scenes 029/035/047) from inside the performer.

Forward

  • The moon caller is scene 053's (p. 192); her "done as they'd made Jim do near the end" is the first hint of JOI's own recovery contact (Notkin's testimony and the wraith material, pp. 736+ and 829+).
  • Cage III: Free Show is in JOI's filmography (endnote 24) — exhibit/cage fusion is its literal plot; "Madame Psychosis" as DMZ (scene 050) and as the Entertainment's lethal star (Notkin's account, p. 788 range) keep all three cages in one name.
  • The overdose itself happens at this party in scene 062 (pp. 234-240: the bathroom, "Too Much Fun"); her survival routes her to Ennet House — intake 8 Nov YDAU per the adopted n.134 ruling (with the main text's "showed up two days ago," p. 364, as printed) — first seen there at the White Flag meeting (scene 074) and in the pre-dawn veil-doctrine interface with Gately (scene 104, pp. 531-538).
  • The acid-and-veil backstory compressed here gets its competing tellings in the Steeply correspondence files — n.234 (Orin's interview answers) and n.269 (Marlon Bain's letters) — and Notkin's U.S.O.U.S. version (scene 159); none of them settles what the veil hides.
  • Itinerary note (Carlisle, useful): the walk narrated here happens after the Lady Delphina farewell-weight errand recounted in scene 060's morning flashback — T to Upper Brighton first, then the Red Line Downtown stop, then this walk to the party.
  • The wheelchaired NOTRE RAI PAYS beggar — Québécois cap, businesslike cut palm, strategic silence — reads as A.F.R. surface in Boston (cf. scene 045's Jarvik-heart wheelchair assassins; the legless videophony thread later); at minimum it's the wheelchair iconography placed directly in Joelle's path the day before I-Day.

Notable passages (8)
  • p. 219: "You can be at certain parties and not really be there." — the scene's first sentence; communication-solipsism in eleven words, and the literal plan.
  • p. 219: "the expanding white V of utter silence in the party's wake." — the end-of-party phenomenology; the image the whole suicide-walk is staged inside.
  • p. 220: "the truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement." — narratorial scalpel; depression-anhedonia pull.
  • p. 221: "always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens." — Joelle's optics-metaphysics; key for film-optics and her mirror-twin logic with Notkin.
  • p. 222: "What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage.... The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit." — the annular cage; one of the book's load-bearing passages.
  • p. 222: "The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much." — Too Much Fun, the phrase that will name her overdose scene and echo to the samizdat.
  • p. 222: "It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole." — the cage's boundaries dissolving in two sentences; the addiction-recovery anthology's sharpest container/contained collapse.
  • p. 223: "like some grotesque clown, in all four mirrors of her little room's walls." — the veilless bottom; the scene's last image.

What links here Timeline events here (14) · Connected from (12) · Passages quoted here (52) · Motifs (8)

Timeline events here

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Motifs